‘Government responsibility to create a free public library system’: Former librarian Emily Drabinski
‘When we read, we are sovereign over our own mind, a sovereignty that can never be abridged,’ Drabinski told Mridula Koshy of The Community Library Project.
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Emily Drabinski is Associate Professor of Library and Information Studies at Queens College, City University of New York and the immediate past president of the American Library Association. Her tenure was marked by right-wing backlash and her own strong statements defending intellectual freedom and emphasising the importance of libraries mobilising as a shared public resource. She is in India visiting libraries and spoke with Mridula Koshy from Free Libraries Network (FLN) about the importance of libraries and why India not having enough of them is a concern.
Excerpts from the conversation:
One of the libraries you visited in India is the library in Delhi in which I am a member, The Community Library Project in Khirki Extension. It is free of cost to members, which is not true of most of the public libraries in India but is true of the libraries in the public library system in the United States. What does “free” mean to you?
At its most essential, free simply means available without cost. In the United States, there are very few things available for free, but public libraries – along with public parks, roads, schools – are among them. This does not mean that libraries are without cost. Running a library is...
